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Teenage kicks

Joss Stone has sold 5m albums, performed in front of two billion people and replaced Sarah Jessica Parker as the face of Gap. Oh, and shes also desperately in love. Not a bad life for an 18-year-old, says Craig McLean

It’s 5pm on a crazy Saturday afternoon, and Joss Stone has just won over 69,000 sun-bronzed, cheerfully refreshed Scots. She is hot off the main stage at this year’s T in the Park festival, and the crowd loved her. When she dedicated You Had Me “to all the girls”, the whoop could be heard all the way to the ceilidh tent. As the pneumatic groove of Don’t Cha Wanna Ride generated an outbreak of dancing across the Perthshire fields, James Brown’s posse — recently arrived backstage — were alerted to the fact that there was competition in the R&B stakes on the day’s bill. Not for the first time, it was easy to forget that this glowing, lung-bursting junior belter is all of 18. And from Devon.

Stone was part amazed and part mortified by the enthusiastic reaction. There was only one response: she got down on her knees in front of